In-person | Friday | May 3 | 7-9pm | Free and open to the public.
Readings: 7-8pm | Refreshments 8-9pm
After an extended in-person absence, Marsh Hawk Press is happy to invite the community to a book launch celebrating five recent titles. These include poetry collections as well as poetic memoirs from the Chapter One: On Becoming a Poet series. Brian Cochran, Mary Mackey, Liane Strauss, Susan Terris, and Tony Trigilio are flying in from all over the map to read from their Marsh Hawk Press titles.
Brian Cochran: Translation Zone, winner of the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press First Prize in Poetry.
Brian Cochran’s first collection of poems explores the porosity of borders—as states, rivers, migration routes, voices—inside the imagination. Prose poems dominate, and topics include Thelonious Monk, the great plains, Philip Guston, hummingbird migration, Ciudad Juárez, river confluences, Yoko Tawada, and the “translation zones” of language, restlessly moving and commenting on themselves.
Mary Mackey: Creativity: Where Poems Begin, from Chapter One: On Becoming a Poet Series.
Both effervescent and analytical… Mackey finds a world that answers to her need to the uncentered, the unconfined… What I like about CREATIVITY is that it doesn’t pretend to be an explicit work of instruction, a how-to for poets. Rather, it is a crisply worded narrative … the polar opposite of a paint-by-the-numbers approach. CREATIVITY implicitly urges the reader to stay receptive and persist through all the doubts, distractions, and “failures” to success, whether the rewards are small or big.” — Poetry Flash Magazine
Liane Strauss: The Flaws in the Story, winner of the 2023 First Prize in Poetry.
“Like Penelope’s daily weaving … each of these fascinating poems is part of a larger story, each an exquisitely observed vignette that pinpoints a moment of conversation, or observation, or travel… Unputdownable, as in ‘so gripping as to be read right through at one sitting.’” –Mary Jo Bang
Susan Terris: Green Leaves, Unseeing
“Susan Terris is a poet of tensile, particular language and fearless investigation. In this far-reaching book, Terris’s gifts of superb observation and word craft turn in multiple directions—into the myths, stories and realities of childhood; into the myths, stories and rendered lives of figures from science, history, and the arts; into the myths, stories, and (sur)realities of personal experience. This book holds the manyness of selves, both intimate and enlarging; it is also a book of connection, world witness, self-witness, and imaginative expansion.” –Jane Hirshfield
Tony Trigilio: Craft: A Memoir, from Chapter One: On Becoming a Poet Series
“An inside look into his progression as a poet–from a ‘middling, utilitarian, rust-belt’ childhood to an accomplished professor of creative writing. With side steps into journalism and music, Trigilio’s true north remains poetry. As he chronicles his own projects—from pop culture to history—Trigilio gives us a behind-the-desk view of one of our most celebrated American poets. A fascinating read.” —Denise Duhamel